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But seriously, I want to know a few things about the class.

2/14/2008 9:35:31 PM

I'm in the group of people that hated it...

it's just matrice's and lots and lots and lots of them...

I REALLY liked 305 so I was like hell yeah I'll take another one of these classes...

451 is basically analysis of power grids, faults and other topics... it's conceivably useful if your going to write a grid management software, but overall I wouldn't recommend taking this class...

I'm sure Joe#'s will have loved this class... but I for one hated it.

2/15/2008 11:46:22 AM

It depends what you want to do when you get out of school. If you are going to do any work in the power industry or many consulting firms that class is probably the most applicable class in State for those fields. The instructor (Grainger) is known in the industry, his book is used throughout the US.

It's not an easy class by no means, but if you go into it knowing it will be hard it will pay off. I personally thought it was one of the few classes that actually applies to my field and I spent extra time studying the subject. Grainger isn't the easiest instructor if you are overly sensitive at all, more of an old-school type instructor. He's there to teach and you are there to pay attention and not goof off, I still have his book in my cube at work.

rancam

[Edited on February 15, 2008 at 3:15 PM. Reason : sp-1]

2/15/2008 3:01:44 PM

Quote :

"I'm sure Joe#'s will have loved this class... but I for one hated it."

haha

Quote :

"The instructor (Grainger) is known in the industry, his book is used throughout the US."

It's not only used throughout the US, but all over the world. I was in his office one day and he showed me several different copies of his book in foreign languages. He said it was translated into something like 50-some languages. That's pretty impressive.

Quote :

"I still have his book in my cube at work."

Me too. I refer to it all the time, especially when I forget the Delta-Wye transformation stuff, especially which leads what by 30 degrees. My boss, and several of my coworkers actually have and use his book.

---

What RanCam said is absolutely correct. If you have any notion of going into the power industry, then take the three power courses, including this one. I believe they are 305, 451, and 453. If you can make it over the hurdle that is the concept of reactive power, then you should do okay with the class, given you put forth a large effort.

I really wish NCSU had more of a power curriculum. Maybe it has a good foundation for undergraduate, but it's non-existant in terms of graduate school. Dr. Grainger actually referred me to go down to Georgia Tech to get my PhD in power, as opposed to a degree in controls (w/ slight emphasis on power) at State with Baran.

Grainger is one of those guys that you have to get to know in order to appreciate him. He's a very nice guy, and is a hell of a guy to drink with (especially Guinness) with great stories about his past. He's definitely old-school and is there to make you work.

2/15/2008 5:50:06 PM

okay, sounds pretty intense. What's the title of the book he wrote? I'm reading this one power systems book, and there's a chance i could take the class but I want to know what's going on before that.

What are the main objectives? Is there a lot of code writing, or is it more sort of static-problem based? If you do code writing, is it more along the lines of turbine/generator response to different things or some sort of grid management?

2/15/2008 6:02:56 PM

He wrote the book Power Systems Analysis (link to Amazon)



From what I remember in the class, there was pretty much no code writing. A lot of the homework problems you will do involve intense matrix operations, so for your convenience you'll probably write some functions (in Matlab or on your TI calculator) to help you make your problems easier, like Kron reduction, and adding/removing nodes to a bus impedance/admittance network.

A lot of the class deals with determining power flow and the various methods by which you can calculate power flow in a nonlinear system. He touches heavily on the Newton-Rhapson method, but there are some others that he may do, like least squares analysis. I can't remember if we used any sort of verification or validation of the system using a chi-square distribution.

We did have one project in which we were given a power system modeled entirely in Matlab, and we were supposed to modify various parameters to determine power flow, etc. But the code was already written and we simply had to change some pre-defined variables.

2/15/2008 6:09:30 PM

mmmk, thanks this is really helpful. I've done R-H and least squares before, that's not a big deal. So far it sounds sort of like glorified circuits.

Do you deal with things like faults in the grid? Like all a sudden a line trips or a station going instantly offline? Or do you deal with any time dependent problems like loss of synchronism?

2/15/2008 6:25:39 PM

I forgot about fault analysis. We spent a good amount of time talking about the various types of faults; line to line, single line to ground, etc., and how it affects a power system in terms of power flow, line voltages, etc.

I can't remember if we dealt with line trips or synchronism in that class. After all, it has been 5 years since I took the class

2/15/2008 6:29:28 PM

Quote :

"He wrote the book Power Systems Analysis "

Stephenson wrote the majority of the book. Grainger updated the book with some of the more extensive bus matrix equations. Grainger was one of the best professors I ever had at State though.

I use the book on a regular basis, and it was by far the most practical class I took at State. I wish the class could have gone into a little bit more detail about fault detection methods, but I guess they figured you could learn all of that in the industry.

2/15/2008 8:29:44 PM

cool, this helps a lot. So far I had been going through this book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/007035958X/ref=cm_rdp_product_img

But I knew I needed to see Dr. Grainger's one two, so I'll be looking at it.

2/16/2008 9:04:58 AM